Hubs, switches, routers and the like provide necessary infrastructure for networking computers and other electronic devices. These devices allow great flexibility in constructing networks by choosing the type of device along with its characteristics, such as the port support it provides. For example, one chip in the device may have 16 ports that operate at 10/100 Mb/s and another chip may have 4 ports that operate at 1 Gb/sec. The number of chips in the device may be expandable, thus providing for a flexible device. However, this complicates the forwarding process. Importantly, while these devices are performing their function of forwarding packets to selected ports such that packets are delivered to appropriate nodes in the network, the forwarding decision must be made rapidly so as to not impede performance. Also, the forwarding decision is complicated by the variety of configurations and features that the device itself may support.
For example, the forwarding process is complicated by the variety of architectures that may be supported. One conventional method requires each chip itself to determine which ports should receive the packet(s). Unfortunately, this requires each chip to support the maximum number of ports that the architecture will ever contain. Consequently, this requires substantial overhead and has little flexibility and poor scalability.
Additionally, the forwarding process may impair device throughput. Another conventional method of forwarding packets is to send all packets to a centralized decision point in the device to determine which ports should receive the packet(s). Unfortunately, this has severe bandwidth limitations because every packet must be processed by a single entity in the device.
Therefore, conventional methods have problems being both efficient and flexible when forwarding packets to selected ports. Conventional methods have difficulty providing a forwarding solution in a flexible architecture that allows for a variable number of cards, each card with a variable number of ports.